Welcome, Politicwikians.
First, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the 78 participants who completed the entrance survey to participate in the PoliticWiki project between July 27, 2005 and January 27, 2006. Twenty-nine of you went a step further by actively participating in the web site, whether just indicating through a watchlist your interest in a page, or contributing in some way to the content of this site. Nine of you also agreed to be interviewed, which greatly illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of this experiment, giving us a course for future work.
With my masters thesis all but done — the presentation, poster and paper (sent to WikiSym 2006) were finished as of last week — I am in the midst of wrapping up the current semester before taking the next steps here. I will be pursuing a Ph.D. in Informatics at Indiana University, so there likely will be related political and community projects on the horizon. My hope is to upgrade the site functionality, presentation and content before delivering this forum to 3rdParty.org by mid summer.
The task immediately at hand is to make sense of the new proposed structure for our political content. The purpose here is to separate objective descriptions of the political domain for each space from the biased political position statements that serve as the foundation for discussion. My expectation is that each member of this forum will constructively collaborate on positions with the intention of being true to the perspective being expressed. If you have a differing view, initiate development of a new position statement. The "official" platform planks should be a clear reflection of the common goals of all positions.
At some point, this process will need to evolve into member roles and a group decision-making process. In my view, that is on the distant horizon. We will also want to work to ground our positions (and therefore our planks) in the real world of academic studies, statistics and — most importantly — local relevancy. This is also on the horizon, although not as distant.
Please contribute actively to this process, realizing that it is still evolving. Lessons learned from the first six months will be applied going forward. Partnerships with other efforts, such as Platform.For-Pgh.org and OpenPolitics, should be embraced.
Thank you, Kevin Makice